Monday, April 2, 2012

Resolutions – March Update

No way to sugar-coat this: March sucked. The weather was bad. I got sick. Work was a hideous mess of deadlines and impossible demands, topped off with a large serving of crazy. And then there was the shift to Daylight Savings Time, which always throws me for a loop. So, I have many explanations for why I didn’t get much writing done. Note that I did not say “excuses.” There is no excuse. I want to write. I need to find the time. Here are the numbers: Total words written in March 2012 – 5,147. Last year, I wrote 6,210 words in March. Apparently, I don’t feel very creative this time of the year. Last month, I wrote more than 21,000 words, so it’s a huge drop in production. Breaking it down even further, it looks like most of my time was spent on the novella (1,506) and very little on the main WIP (886) that I want to finish, uh, soonish. I had to come up with a new category for miscellaneous writing, and I managed to write 2,755 words in this category. The worst part – and yes, it gets worse than a 75% drop in word production – is that I only wrote 8 days last month. That’s a long way from my goal of writing every day. On the plus side, I got a couple chapters back from my critique partner and her suggestions made the chapters much stronger. Her feedback also inspires me to get back to work, so I’m going to rework those chapters tonight to get my head back in the story. I also had a great weekend away, driving to my hometown with a couple old friends and it seems to have jump-started my creative impulses. I was ambushed by a plot bunny – the same one that attacked last year when I traveled home, but this time I took notes for a future project. In May, I hope to be reporting that I’m back in the 20,000-word range again and that March was simply an aberration. At least I can be fairly confident that I’ll beat last year’s April total, which was a measly 424 words. But not if I keep writing this entry and not opening my project files.